Lawyer for Boston marathon bomber seeks new trial

New York (AFP) – A lawyer for Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev asked Thursday for a new trial, arguing that his client’s rights had been violated. 

A panel of three judges heard the appeal from the lawyer appointed for Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death in 2015 for planting two home-made bombs near the finish line of the iconic race in 2013, killing three people and injuring 264 others. 

Tsarnaev, now 26, is being held at Florence, a maximum security prison in Colorado considered one of the harshest in the country. He was not present for the hearing. 

Lawyer Daniel Habib outlined three arguments in asking for a new trial.  

In a recording of Thursday’s hearing, Habib can be heard claiming that Tsarnaev’s original 2015 trial should not have been held in Boston because the city was still so traumatized by the attack.

He also questioned the neutrality of two jurors, who lied during jury selection about whether they had had conversations about the case on social media. 

One of them lied about calling Tsarnaev “a piece of garbage” on Twitter, Habib said, and the judge presiding over the case at the time, George O’Toole, did not investigate the situation. 

Lastly, Habib said, trial jurors did not hear evidence that Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died four days after the attack in a confrontation with police, had committed murder two years earlier. 

Tsarnaev, a US citizen who was 19 at the time of the bombings and came to the United States from the former Soviet Union five years earlier, admits having taken part in the attack. 

But his defense has always claimed his older brother is the more culpable of the two, pointing out that Dzhokhar was a college sophomore with no history of violence. 

They asked to present evidence showing Tamerlan was involved in killing three people in 2011, but the judge refused. 

Federal death penalty cases are rare in the US, with the overwhelming majority of such sentences handed down by state courts. The last federal execution took place in 2003. 

The Supreme Court earlier this month refused the Trump administration’s call to lift a stay on federal executions, upon further review of the practice. 

It is unclear when the appeals court will issue its decision on a possible new Tsarnaev trial.